Chapter 1: Stella

Stella had never looked like a woman who could hunt a man. She was too small for it, too slender, too delicately made, with narrow shoulders, fine wrists, and a face that seemed more suited to a piano in a respectable parlor than to the hard towns and dusty trails where men disappeared for money.

Even the way she walked invited the wrong conclusions. She moved lightly, almost cautiously, as though the earth beneath her boots might bruise her if she stepped too heavily, and when she entered a room full of men she rarely looked directly at them at first, preferring to let her presence be discovered rather than announced.

That was precisely why she was good at her work. Men underestimated Stella with an eagerness that sometimes seemed almost flattering, as though they were grateful to find in the harshness of the frontier one creature who appeared incapable of hurting them.

She had discovered early that a woman did not always need to be stronger than a man to defeat him. Sometimes it was enough to let him believe that she was weaker, because a man who expected a gunfighter watched the hands, a man who expected a bounty hunter watched the eyes, but a man who saw a fragile young woman standing before him usually watched her face.

Stella preferred it that way. She relied upon the peculiar power of femininity, not in the theatrical manner of women who deliberately displayed themselves, but in something subtler – the softness of her voice, the slight uncertainty in her manner, the lowered eyes, the faint smile that suggested she was uncomfortable rather than dangerous.

She was not a good shot. She had never pretended otherwise, and although she had a revolver like every respectable hunter of men, she regarded it with the same confidence she might have placed in a poorly trained horse.

At twenty paces she could put a bullet somewhere near a target, and at thirty she could put it somewhere in the surrounding county. She had once emptied six cartridges at a tin cup and managed to hit it twice, although one of those shots had been fired after the cup had already fallen.

Her friend Elias had laughed until he nearly choked. Then, after he had recovered, he had done something that would eventually make Stella considerably more dangerous than any improvement in her marksmanship could have made her.

He built her a special pistol.

It was a peculiar little weapon, no larger than a man’s hand, with a short barrel and a mechanism so cleverly concealed that most people would have taken it for an oddly shaped piece of metalwork. Elias had been an inventor of questionable judgment and extraordinary patience, which was a dangerous combination in the American West, and he had spent several weeks designing something that would compensate for Stella’s greatest weakness.

The pistol was attached to the right side of her belt. It did not need to be drawn, aimed, or even touched, because Elias had devised a mechanism by which a sudden flex of her right knee activated the hidden trigger and caused the little weapon to fire.

It was not a beautiful gun. It was too small, too strange, and too specialized to inspire admiration, but Stella had never cared much about beauty in weapons.

“What exactly is this thing supposed to do?” she had asked Elias when he first showed it to her.

“Surprise people,” he had replied.

She had looked at him suspiciously. “That’s all?”

Elias had shrugged. “If you want something that kills buffalo, I’ll build you something bigger.”

“I don’t hunt buffalo.”

“Good. Because this thing would make the buffalo angry.”

Stella had smiled then, although she had already understood that he had accidentally created something much more useful than a conventional pistol. A gun was dangerous because a man could see it, understand it, and react to it, whereas Stella’s little weapon was dangerous precisely because nobody knew it was there until the sound had already happened.